Category Archives: Lewis and Clark Lake

Some friends of mine had rented a campsite for the weekend and had invited me to come along. We didn’t have a boat and it wasn’t a “fishing trip” per say.. but who are we kidding if I’m that close to one of my favorite lakes, I’m bringing a pole or three!

We had set a few lines the night before and only caught a small white bass. But today I decided to take a little walk and go down to the Marina on the SD side of the lake. The wind was blowing into the shoreline on the jetty I stopped at and was causing a bit of stirred up water. I started by throwing a crankbait but caught much weeds, switched to a spinner bait and didn’t get a single strike. So, knowing that there was a good population of smallmouth in this lake I switched up a little bit and went to my spinning rod, lighter line and a shaky head with a small brown crawdad plastic on it. I started to get a few bites but they were hard to catch because of the wind. By the time I realized one had my bait it had already run a short ways and spit out the lure. But I did manage to catch a few doing this, and they sure fought like crazy!

After a little while I decided to skip to the other side of the jetty and fish the calm waters where the wind couldn’t reach it. I noticed right away due to the water clarity and the calm water that I could see fish swimming around. A lot of them were sunfish and carp but there were a few smallmouth and also some drum swimming around there. I found that with my polarized sunglasses that if I stayed up the bank about 10+ feet I could spot the fish without spooking them. I would then cast this little crawdad lure down near them and shake it up to the rocks there were searching for bait in. I ended up catching a really large drum and probably 8-10 small, smallmouth bass this way! It was fun and exiting to see it all happen like that. But eventually I spooked a good number of them and decided to call it a day.

Lake Ranking 5 start: Definitely a great lake though, I love the diversity of the water and the species of fish. I did enjoy it a little more last year when i went out on the lake in a boat.

Each fall we have started to do a father and sons fishing trip and we chose this weekend for our adventure this year. For these trips we usually like to get out of town a couple of hours to a place we can stay and have a couple of good days of fishing. We originally chose to go to Mozingo in Maryville MO but after looking through fishing reports we found there was a Bass tournament that held approximately 25 -30 boats so we decided a week before the trip to change it up. Non of us had ever been up to Yankton to fish Lewis and Clark Lake but it was very intriguing with the types of fish and size of the lake that we decided to go there.

The weather was supposed to be chilly all weekend but not very windy. However we quickly found out that on the main lake with a wind coming directly from the east that the waves could get very large! We found a ramp on the southwest side of the lake that was tucked out of the wind a little bit and had some rock jetties that we could fish around.

On Saturday we started we started at this ramp and quickly started catching some smallmouth around the rocks! The first fish we caught was a 2.5 lb smallmouth on a spinner bait. We stayed in this little area near the ramp a lot for two reasons, one we were out of the wind and protected and two we were catching fish! We tried throwing all sorts of lures but the one that seemed to work the best was shad colored deep diving crank bait. It had to be in constant contact with the bottom to get the bites and so much so that we continually got it caught in the rocks and had to retrieve the lure! So on Day one we caught about 4-5 bass 1 Norther pike and one Stripper!

The next day we decided to try the river south of the dam. After about an hour of fighting the current and hitting two sand bars we decided to pull the boat out and go back to the main lake. On the main lake again we caught a few more bass and Northern pike fishing the same pattern as the day before.. Deep diving crankbaits around whatever rocks we could find.

This is a lake a I definitely want to visit again but i would want to spend a lot of time just driving around the lake and looking at depths and structures to decide where and how to fish. If is a great lake with a lot of opportunity but I feel like in order to really be successful you would need to know that lake well. This post is picture heavy but enjoy it because we caught some good fish!